MSExcel question

[nickbaer]

I sell eBooks, and Books (and DVDs) on Amazon and Nook are assigned ISBN numbers, ISBN-10 and ISBN-13.

MS Excel, seems to want to put strings of numeric characters, sometimes called "numbers", 10 characters and larger, into scientific notation.

Of course that really wrecks the ISBN "number".

How dos one turn that feature "off"? (Turning 10+ character numeric strings into scientific notation).

[PUMPaul]

Change the default cell format from General to Text. If you put all your ISBN numbers in the same column you can change the format of the entire column at once to make things easier.

[nickbaer]

It's a bit more complicated than that.

Amazon, and Nook, send daily .csv reports. They open in MSExcel (and Apple Numbers), with 10+ character numeric strings converted to scientific notation.

Sometimes, changing column format to text works. But when you save as .csv, and open again (double click), it's scientific notation again.

If you save that without converting to text, you typically are stuck with scientific notation that cannot be undone. Of course, I save my files with serialized filenames, usually by adding the date, so I can work my way backwards.

But it is a huge pain, and when I Google search on the topic, I get results from people from India who don't seem to grasp the concept that ISBN "numbers" are not mean't to do arithmetic on.

[asiaboy]

CSV only saves the (delimited) text, not the formatting. If you want to keep the formatting you need to save it as an Excel sheet. CSV is just a universal format that makes it easy to import things in Excel or whatever spreadsheet you use.

[nickbaer]

No, MSExcel is opening a .csv WITH formatting (10+ character numeric string as scientific notation), rather than withOUT as I would expect and prefer.

That action really screws up my numbers.

[asiaboy]

No, it does not. It just displays it that way. If you open the CSV as a text file in notepad you will see that. Excel just formats it on the fly. If you save it as an Excel sheet your problem is solved.

CSV = comma separated value. That's all it is, a bunch of values

[nickbaer]

Bert -

Let's wait for someone to come along who has had to deal with the same experience.

Your statements do not fit my experience(s).